Articles
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Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-on Outage
Recently, Firefox had an incident in which most add-ons stopped working. This was due to an error on our end: we let one of the certificates used to sign add-ons expire which had the effect of disabling the vast majority of add-ons. Now that we’ve fixed the problem for most users and most people’s add-ons are restored, I wanted to walk through the details of what happened, why, and how we repaired it.
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Owning it: browser compatibility data and open source governance
What does it mean to “own” an open-source project? With the browser-compat-data project (“BCD”), the MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) community and I recently had the opportunity to find out.
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Introducing Mozilla WebThings
Project Things is graduating from its early experimental phase and from now on will be known as Mozilla WebThings. This platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web consists of the WebThings Gateway, a software distribution for smart home gateways focused on privacy, security and interoperability, and the WebThings Framework, a collection of reusable software components that help developers build their own web-connected things.
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Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations
Fluent is a family of localization specifications, implementations and good practices developed by Mozilla. With Fluent, translators can create expressive translations that sound great in their language. Today we’re announcing version 1.0 of the Fluent file format specification. We’re inviting translation tool authors to try it out and provide feedback.
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Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser
Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser. We think it’s worthwhile to work on moving the JavaScript data science ecosystem forward, and that's why we built and released Iodide earlier this year. In the meantime, we’re meeting data scientists where they are by bringing the popular and mature Python scientific stack to the browser.
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Developer Roadshow 2019 returns with VR, IoT and all things web
Mozilla Developer Roadshow is a meetup-style, Mozilla-focused event series for people who build the web. In 2017, the Roadshow reached more than 50 cities around the world sharing highlights of Mozilla and Firefox technologies. Now, we’re back! To open our 2019 series, Mozilla presents two events with VR visionary Nonny de la Peña and the Emblematic Group in Los Angeles and in New York.
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Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
To help get bugs in front of the right Firefox engineers quickly, we developed BugBug, a machine learning tool that automatically assigns a product and component for each new untriaged bug. By presenting new bugs to triage owners faster, we hope to decrease the turnaround time to fix new issues. Check out BugBug for your own issue-tracking triage.
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Sharpen your WebVR skills with experiments from Glitch and Mozilla
Earlier this year, we partnered with Glitch.com on a starter kit that teaches the fundamentals of WebVR using A-Frame. Today, we introduce a week of WebVR experiments that build on the basics. Designed by Glitch creator Andrés Cuervo, each experiment is unique and is meant to teach and inspire as you craft your own WebVR experiences.
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Crossing the Rust FFI frontier with Protocol Buffers
The Firefox Application Services engineering team made the decision to use Rust to build cross-platform components for Firefox Sync, powering Firefox Accounts across many devices. They are implementing core business logic using Rust and wrapping it in a thin platform-native layer, such as Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS.
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A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 kb/s Using LPCNet
This is an update on the LPCNet project, an efficient neural speech synthesizer from Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies group. LPCNet combines signal processing and deep learning to improve the efficiency of neural speech synthesis. Our recent work turns LPCNet into a very low-bitrate neural speech codec that’s actually usable on current hardware and even on phones.
